Cellular telephones equipped with cameras, camera-phones, are in widespread use today. Telephones (camera or otherwise) are designed to help their users. Thus, a design assumption is that the user can be fully trusted and is given full authority over the phone.
However, in many cases, the role of the phone user is different from the role of the phone owner or responsible party. Often the phones are given by an owner or more generally, any party that is responsible for the given phone, to some end user. For example, a parent may give a phone to a teenager, and a corporate or government manager may assign a phone to his or her employee. Sometimes camera-phones are misused or used in manners that are illegal, improper, or potentially embarrassing to the responsible party. Media attention has focused on cheating in exams and taking inappropriate pictures of other people. There could be a question of legal or financial liability for the responsible party. For example, a suburban family may be sued if their child is caught distributing the neighbor's pictures, or an insurance company could be sued and embarrassed if one of its adjusters is misusing his camera.
Although parental controls for TV and Internet sites exist for controlling access to content, there are no known specific techniques to manage the image content of a camera-phone. TV parental controls work by blocking television programming based upon its rating or by blocking certain channels. Internet controls work by blocking access to certain web content by restricting access to certain Internet sites. This is accomplished by either matching the names of the sites with selected key words or by looking up central registries (maintained by the product vendor or service provider) that have URLs for undesirable adult sites. Unfortunately, conventional parental control techniques cannot work for camera-phones because the content or subject matter of the pictures taken by the camera cannot be known ahead of time.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method and system that provides parental and corporate content controls for camera-phones. The present invention addresses such a need.